The Double Lamp of Solitude

The Double Lamp of Solitude by Joshua Edwards is a luminous blend of poetry, prose, and photography. An exploration of how travel, translation, and solitude shape the way we see the world. Taking its cue from the word periplum - Ezra Pound’s term for a map drawn from a traveler’s own point of view—this collection invites readers into the shifting perspectives of a poet on the move.

The book opens with “Three Landscapes,” a trio of long walks retracing the final journeys of Friedrich Hölderlin, Federico García Lorca, and Miguel Hernández. Edwards layers his prose with photographs, translations, and fragments of the poets’ own work, creating an intimate dialogue across languages and centuries. In doing so, he makes a quiet but powerful case: translation is not separate from writing, it is another way of composing, another lamp lit in solitude.

Later, in the “Lamps” series, his lyric poems search for what illuminates both the outer world and the inner life. Whether tracing a physical path or the invisible one between reader and writer, The Double Lamp of Solitude is a meditation on time, memory, and the ways that art - across languages, mediums, and lives - radiates through both.